Sweet dreams
by Blizdal
Summary: Doug fought and it hurt. Hammond was not there.


Sweet dreams

.

One soldiers injects him and the other tells him to

_Fight as much as possible. It hurts more that way._

Shortly after, they all lay dead.

Carl Hauser doesn't like assholes. Maybe because he is one.

*/*/*

He comes for her and frees her and she thinks _Thank God_ and _he got away before they could change him back_.

She kisses him, relieved and grateful, and they run.

Afterwards, when Cohaagen is dead and the ambulance surrounds them, she leans her forehead to his and is _happy happy happy_.

*/*/*

Months later, she sees him exchange significant looks with a man across the street and thinks nothing of it.

It is only normal. After all, she doesn't know every person he has ever met.

*/*/*

She looks into his eyes every day, trying to see the man she loves.

_She has to make sure that he is _her_ Hauser and not the other one._

She finds him, every single time.

He notices, but only raises an eyebrow and doesn't say anything. Sometimes he smiles softly, indulgently, when he catches her. She goes to him, like a moth to a flame.

*/*/*

She will burn.

*/*/*

He goes to the store and it takes him a long time to return.

There is mud on his shoes (and asphalt on the street).

*/*/*

Sometimes she wonders how much he actually remembers. She knows it is more than just the night he was captured, the one he had told her he had dreamed about as Doug. They don't talk about it, but she sees it in the way he acts. Doug became a shadow.

She misses him from time to time. He was earnest then, and frightened the way he never is now.

*/*/*

There is a note in his pocket with the words _the sun is rising _written on it. She wonders about it. She doesn't recognize the handwriting. She wants to ask Carl about it but when he walks in and sees her holding it he doesn't seem flustered or surprised. There is no alarm in his eyes, no attempt to justify or hide, just a smile and-

"Hello, _there_ you are."

*/*/*

She fears he will wake up one day and have no memory of her at all. Not even a vivid dream.

She is afraid it will be the old Hauser that greats her. Or maybe he will not great her at all. Maybe he will kill her while she sleeps.

Maybe it will be Douglas that looks out from his eyes, confused, frightened and searching for _her_.

Maybe he will just stop one day, his mind broken, and never start moving again.

*/*/*

Perhaps, one day _she_ will open her eyes and realize that nothing was real; not the UFB, not the Colony, nor the Resistance; that there is no old or new Hauser, that there is no Doug, just an image in her mind. She will wake up in a world where he doesn't exist at all.

*/*/*

The cold blade of a knife touching her throat wakes her up. She freezes before she catches Hauser's eyes. She relaxes then, despite the knife and he smiles that same, soft smile.

Her blood freezes and doesn't thaw when he removes the knife.

"It worked." She states, horrified, suddenly understanding, and he glances at her before getting up. "You're the old Hauser. Cohaagen succeeded after all." Her voice is bleak.

He shrugs "I am Hauser." She flinches when she sees the coldness creep into his eyes. She realizes that she has never really met this Hauser before. He was undercover when they met, and changed for the better when he revealed who he was to the Resistance. She never realized that Cohaagen succeeded in rebooting his mind. She consoles herself with the fact that Hauser was the best for a reason. She mourns and waits and remembers the way Douglas killed Harry, quickly and efficiently and _bang_, he was gone.

She hears him move and is too numb to cry this time.

"Why pretend?" She asks quickly, desperately, the only thing she wants to know before she dies.

"I had a mission to infiltrate the Resistance."

"But-"

"It's not like I had any memories of already having done it."

She understands then, and feels stupid for asking.

"I had Doug's memories, of course, but the procedure was freshly done and my mind needed time to assimilate them all. It was a right jumble at the time."

"And when you realized what was going on? Why am I still alive? Cohaagen said you were loyal and a patriot."

And ruthless, she doesn't say.

"Cohaagen was an asshole, and I never liked him anyway. But he was right, I am a patriot."

"But you're not loyal."

"I am when it is deserved."

"And I don't deserve it?" She grounds out, starting to get angry.

"Why do you think I'm telling you all this?"

"For sadistic pleasure."

"I am not a sadist."

She believes him. It is a problem. She always does.

She reaches out to him, and when her hand touches his arm, she looks up into his eyes and sees him-

_just like every other time _

-and it burns, like thousand suns, when he smiles.

*/*/*

"Do you know who that man is, Melina?"

"I do."

"I doubt it. If you knew you would never be with him."

"I know he was Cohaagen's agent."

"He was the _worst_."

"I heard he was the best."

"He was the best for them. To be the best you have to be the worst. And he was the worst, to us. "

Her friend rubs his wrist unconsciously. There are scars there. She has seen them before.

It is different seeing them now, knowing who put them there. Her stomach rolls.

"We've all done terrible things."

"_He is the worst._ He will betray us all._"_

"We are not fighting anymore. We have won."

"Do you really think that the war is over?"

She looks at him, stricken.

"The UFB still needs more land and the Colony still has it."

"Carl is one of us now." She persists. "Matthias-"

"- is dead. And who is the one responsible for that?" There is hate in his eyes, awful and immense, but it is nowhere near as big as the fear it hides behind when Carl comes to stand by her side.

Hauser doesn't seem to have recognized him and she wonders, in that moment of calmness before horror sets in, just how many he must have tortured before all the faces started to blend in.

*/*/*

She refuses to contemplate his kill count. (She refuses to contemplate her own)

*/*/*

He runs into someone and instead of saying _Sorry_ whispers _Sweet dreams_, and it is obviously a code for something. Rekall, is her first association. She knows it's not dreaming that goes on in there, but that's how people refer to it afterwards. _What did you dream?_

She looks up at him, when the woman leaves, quickly hiding herself in the crowd. Anger threatens to overwhelm her but she viciously wrestles it down and _thinks_.

This is not the first time she has seen him do something suspicious.

There was a power vacuum left after Cohaagen died.

Hauser is a legend in certain circles and not everyone hates him, jealously, like Lori.

He's been very friendly with the members of the Resistance.

"What are you doing?" She asks, hoarsely, betrayed. "I'm with the Resistance." She says, for the first time in a while using the present tense. There was no need for it before.

"I know." He says, calmly.

'_I can't lose him again.'_ She thinks, and imagines the thought as a whisper, treacherously slithering through her mind, wrapping itself around all the other thoughts and keeping them down. She tries to blink away the sting in her eyes. Some people grumble as they go around them, for blocking the way. It's a busy street and a busy time of day. She ignores them and thinks about what she can live with and what she can't live with. She thinks about the bullet she didn't put in his head and about the one he didn't put in hers; about knives and burning smiles and _whatever happens, _she takes his hand-

_he caresses the scar on her palm_

-and heartbroken says

"All right."

*/*/*

Fortunately, Carl Hauser was never an ambitious man.

He doesn't admit it to Melina, but he still dreams of her falling, and his memory may be spotty in places but he remembers how it felt when she slipped through his fingers.

_Sweet dreams_ means go to sleep, goodbye, cease or you die.

He likes the life he has now.

*/*/*

The End


End file.
